Dark Falcon

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 2002

Label: 555 Recordings

A Sewing Circle
The Lucky Dragon [Fukuryu Maru] was the name of a Japanese tuna trawler which was caught in the fallout of the United States' hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll on March 1st, 1954. All 23 members of the boat's crew suffered the effects of radiation sickness after being rained on by ash from the explosion, 500 miles away. Once the boat itself had been determined free of dangerous radiation, it was painted entirely black and put out to sea again, still for use as a fishing vessel, but re-christened as The Dark Falcon.

Track 1: Holly kept a large green sketchbook into which she pasted photos, bits of writing and other pretty things through the years. Along with photos of friends and pencil drawings was this poem, divided across a couple slips of paper, and facing a collection of carefully cutout body parts from a transvestite magazine. The words got stuck in her head and attached themselves to a melody, which she recorded on a tape and mailed to Luke. He and Brendan recorded the guitar and banjo sitting in the kitchen on Ring Street in Providence, Rhode Island, and Mike played the drums in the living room. It was around the 4th of July so the kids in the neighborhood were setting off firecrackers constantly--so close to the kitchen window that sometimes it was all you could hear on the tape. A little research discovers the words were accidentally stolen from the Irish folk song "Come Rest In This Bosom, My Own Stricken Deer".

Track 6: One explanation for the end of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey comes from the historian Arnold Toynbee: that time moves neither in circles nor in a straight line, but in a spiral, so that the past and the future intersect in unexpected places, and in unexpected ways. Sometime in the eighties the phrase "Toynbee idea in movie 2001 resurrect dead on Planet Jupiter" was stenciled at street intersections in several cities by someone who seems to have felt the urgency connected with this point of view enough to reproduce it over and over everywhere they went. The words to this song belong to a series of dreams Holly had after our friend Shira died in the winter of 1997, dreams of a place where the past and the future met, and the dead were resurrected. The music is made from a recording of the chimes hanging on Holly's parents' porch, when freezing rain fell in the dead of winter.

Track 16: Pablo recorded the original "Girlworld" on a walk early one fall morning right before he moved to Glasgow. When Luke and Holly made it to Scotland to visit him, the days were slowly starting to get longer again, no one was in love with anyone any more, and all three of them shared a single bed in his often unheated flat.

Track 17: Through the furnace unshrinking, thy steps to pursue.and shield thee and save thee, or perish there too. You know?

Track 21: Bells from the church near Will and Peter's house in Philadelphia, Will's stereo bleeding in from his room on the first floor, Cricket, Holly, and Bill talking and laughing three winters ago. A first attempt at ending things cleanly.

On CD: Come, rest in this bosom of my own stricken deer

Compiled in the Northern Northern Liberties section of Philadelphia, Augtember 2002. Product by 555 Recordings, as executed by the dualpLOVER family.

Packaged in a gatefold, card stock sleeve with art panels glued to front and back cover, with insert.

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